This article was composed by Anna Proskurina from the interview with Olena Hermasimyuk, where she spoke about the importance of Ukrainian, in particular veteran, art as a way to remember, comprehend, and communicate to the general public the experience of the Ukrainian nation. The article mostly uses the direct wording of Ms Olena.

The phenomenon of veteran literature in Ukraine is just emerging. We see authors who have already written before the war and then went to the battlefields, such as Boris Humeniuk, Oleg Korotash, Yaryna Chornoguz. These are the established artists who realized that poets are also soldiers, like other people, and that poets can also do something not only through their literature. Along with that, there were absolute naturals that experienced a phenomenon that I call the awakening of the spirit. According to some scholars, there are more than 600 or 800 books written by Ukrainian war veterans, hence direct participants in hostilities.

My grandfather, after a terrible operation due to an injury at work, began to write poetry. After experiencing this state of closeness to death, he began to perceive the world differently, to look for more beauty in it, although previously he had already been a man of the arts.

Now I also see that many veterans began to write after having experienced a condition that cannot be compared to anything, since it is a mixture of a mad desire for life and constant life in the shadow of death in these deadly circumstances. These are people like Vitaliy Zapeka, Vasyl Piddubny, these are hundreds of names of bright authors who were born, flared up and may their light shine long after this war is over.

For example, Vitaliy Zapeka has an interesting story. He was under fire (at the front – ed.) and thinking about what to give his granddaughter for her birthday. He thought he had little money, he wasn’t a big dreamer to think of what she liked, because they hadn’t seen each other in a long time, so he decided to write her a fairy tale. And he created a work of art as a gift to his granddaughter, thus reaching art.

A very wonderful case of such a writer, who opened his talent up in the war and received an additional boost of his talent is Valery Guzyk. He writes just ingenious things, in my opinion. Before the war, he was already writing, he was an artist. But his short prose written after joining the army is something amazing, it is something on a par with Kosynka, with Vasyl Porotyak, something significant. Such polyphony of characters, symbols and time-space, which he has, can absolutely be suitable for the whole novel, and he has the talent to put it in short form literature.

And the same goes for poetry. There is, of course, a lot of marching poetry, analogous to that which was used by Cossack ancestors of Ukrainians. This is such good literature, unambiguous, without artistic images, with specific messages, which can be written even for a specific army unit. But it is necessary, it is the grassroots literature on the basis of which something great will be created. Because something great cannot be a “spherical horse in a vacuum”, it must be based on some popular fundament, it is the law of art. Only when there is a grassroots culture, only then can there be something great. Many authors voiced this opinion, including Serhiy Zhadan, and the same is written in almost all textbooks.

Literature has a very strong psychological effect. When I was in the hospital for war veterans in Lisova Polyana, I saw what Afghan veterans were reading. It struck me to the core. They mostly took Russian literature, like the cheapest books about Afghanistan, Kandahar and so on. Because in Ukrainian literature, veteranship is such a silenced topic that they cannot associate themselves with any of the characters. They do not know about Stovpchuk, about Ulyanenko, who by the way was banned by some shameful commission on national morality in independent Ukraine. They do not have access to what we consider to be elitarian literature because of their education or lack of interest, because of their artistic preferences. But that was the time I saw there is a need for both grassroots and elite literature.

It seems to me that after the war we need people who will stamp grassroots literature. We still have a lot of Russian grassroots literature on which Russia built its propaganda model. These series, music, and books don’t seem to contain anything particular against Ukraine. But they were the basis for Russian propaganda in Ukraine.

Of course, grassroots art will not affect Europeans, because it is what only we can perceive. It will never be translated and will not perform any function abroad. But art, unlike politics, is a very concentrated phenomenon, especially poetry. Good poetry can immerse a person in the ecstatic state that the lyrical hero is experiencing in just one moment. This is a direct duty of any good poetry, whether propaganda or philosophical lyrics. Even if it is a wreath of sonnets, these sonnets must plunge into that ecstatic state. This is the main purpose of poetry. Of course, literature needs a good translation, because according to the Schopenhauer scale, literature has the least impact on a person in another country, since it requires a really good translation. Nevertheless, artistic creativity is a concentrated invisible bullet that simply bursts, and gives an understanding of what the hero feels, if an author can immerse the reader in this world. It has its potential. Literature’s role is not feasible like the supply of weapons, land leases or geopolitical games, but it can take the role of explaining the experience of Ukrainian society and its feelings to the European audiences.

I was recently invited to a poetry reading event in Canada, where we read our poems online. Actually, I read a new poem about Mariupol, this is the only poem I have written during this period (since the beginning of the full-scale phase of the war – ed.). It was more of an answer to people who kept asking me why I wasn’t writing. I was defending Mariupol during the war in the East of Ukraine, where my crew member, Mykola Volkov, died, and this was the first loss of our battalion (the Hospitallers Battalion, Ukrainian Volunteer Paramedical Battalion founded in 2015 by Yana Zinkevych – ed.). Mariupol was very important in the history of the Hospitallers, and this poem was more of an answer like “What I should write when my readers are killed, which poems? What poetry can there be after that?” However, now I am witnessing that this poem is used to explain to the world that this war is happening, and it is death, here in Ukraine death and war are happening.

In order to convey information to Ukrainian and foreign audiences, we worked on the “Shooting Calendar” project, which systematised Soviet repression in Ukraine not in the usual chronological order, but with reference to the traditional calendar. Not only are the dates recorded, but there are also short stories about the fate of people who have been persecuted and tortured. These stories are structured, dry, emotionless, and corroborating with evidence. Before I got sick, I had meetings regarding the translation of the “Shooting Calendar” book. I was offered a translation in English and German to show people who know these languages that this war is not a coincidence and not just a conflict. This is a natural genocide staged by Russia against Ukraine. Literally, every day is stained with blood. We do not have days in our calendar that do not indicate that Russia has committed this genocide against us for centuries.

This idea was on the surface, it was always obvious to me. I was interested in literature and could not help but notice that in the books I studied, there is no mention of how our classics died. In the textbooks with which I studied in the 1990s, I did not see a description of those mass deaths, as it is in the Soviet tradition to hide it. And yet, my grandfather told me about them. Actually, that’s why I just wrote such a literary calendar about how our people died. At first, I was accused of it being a very bloody work, but how else can it be? Why should these sufferings go unnoticed? We can see that on one day, November 3, we have a hundred poets being executed. How could this happen?

Our projects include associative cards. We interviewed veterans and made “MAK450” cards about the war in Ukraine. We have them in two versions and distribute them abroad to play into people’s association, for example, what is your association with this card, and what is mine, Ukrainian?

Sometimes the dialogues with people to whom we show these cards are impressive. This is the only way people understand that we see this world differently. We have a card that depicts the sky in cells in a metaphorical way. And when someone sees the Louvre there, and we say that the reference to this card was the basement of the Isolation torture chamber (a prison set up by the self-proclaimed DNR in Donetsk, where Ukrainians have been illegally detained and tortured since 2014 – ed.), then people are speechless. It is a breakdown of patterns, an understanding that life is not happening only in the way you see it around you. Where one sees beauty, we, Ukrainians, see death and try to overcome it.

The interview was conducted and some parts of it summarized in this article by Anna Proskurina.

Translated into English by Anna Proskurina and into German by Nele Koenig.